"Starting in June, every weekend we’d load up the Gran Torino with coolers and tents and sleeping bags and bug spray. Marty and I sat in the way back, so we didn’t have to listen to books on tape. We’d occupy ourselves by reading comics until we got carsick. Then we’d play the license plate game, though we never saw more than a dozen different states on the four-hour drive.

I was eleven. Marty was almost ten. As his older brother, I was supposed to protect him from the perils of childhood. But because we were so close in age, we figured things out together mostly.

There was nothing wrong with Marty. He was small. The doctors said he always would be. And he was just reaching that age when it started to matter. His main coping strategy was cardboard boxes. Whenever Marty felt anxious or scared, he’d go down to the basement and climb into one. The first time I found him there it was a couple weeks after the accident."